


So-Called Happy Returns

by sybilius, veeraha



Series: Black Beats and Low Leads: Leads Notebook [2]
Category: Death Note, Death Note: Another Note
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Breakup, F/M, Roleplay to Fic, Sadness, Smoking, past relationship, slight dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-17 02:41:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8127248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sybilius/pseuds/sybilius, https://archiveofourown.org/users/veeraha/pseuds/veeraha
Summary: B pays a call to A on her birthday. The two of them reconcile what a year's distance has done to their relationship.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome!
> 
> This is the second of the 'leads' in Black Beats and Low Leads. These are shorter side-stories that the writers wish to explore about the characters and the way they interact. They function a bit like "easter eggs" for the main series. This story is set in 1997, just over a year before A's death.

_Something Like a Birthday Card_ [do not edit or repost]

* * *

 

**Jan 8, 1997**

 

Snow drifts in smoke-soft swirls around the ankles as the plane lands in Pulkovo. The red-eye from Kiev at this time of the year are always deserted and the man with the spectacles is the only one in the flight eager to want to get home before the blizzard hits. A bows her head and tells him the story of her mother waiting for her to return home after a university trip with her boyfriend. The year isn’t even a month old and everyone is still hopeful, it’s always easy to manoeuvre a conversation if you know exactly what they want to hear.

‘Never forget to put in a mother in your stories. Mothers are always a blind spot’, a disembodied inner voice speaks in A’s head. A doesn’t recognize it over the cacophony of other phantom voices and other half-remembered conversations fading into each other inside her skull.

There are only a couple of more people on the flight anyway- a middle aged woman with a scarf wrapped around her head and an old drunkard who passed out right after they’d taken off. A slips away while the stewards jostle the old man out of his seat.

The taxi waits for her outside the terminus and the cool glass windows are the best headrest for someone who hasn’t slept in a proper bed in months. The city outside is half formed, not all of its windows lit and A has chased too many shadows around these buildings to know that monsters here are only as real as the voices in her head. It gets livelier in the summer and in another lifetime, A had wanted to put on a dress and wait for a lover at Kazanskaya with a rose in her hand. But winter makes the city cruel. There’s nothing here but kids with empty skulls groping around your pockets looking for a cheap high and A always travels light. All she has in the leather duffel are underwear, cigarettes and the beretta the taxi driver had slipped in her coat pocket. It was reassuring to have some friends left in the city after what happened.

-

‘I’ll be at the Panama on the day, will wait for your call’ says the voice in her ear and she clutches onto its sleeves before it disappears into the night like fading tendrils of cigarette smoke. The lane is deserted but the face she thought she saw hasn’t left her alone since Siberia.

This B is rougher at the edges and infinitely more beautiful than the flesh and bone B she’d fed ducks with back in Winchester and this is probably the only one she is allowed to have.

Not having to watch over her shoulder all the time should feel like a relief, but the paranoia feels more the phantom ache of an amputated limb. A pushes her fingers deeper in her pockets seeking warmth. This part of the city is lonely at night, but she has the voices for company. B’s footsteps follow her till the main apartment before they stop. Maybe they were never there at all.

-

Elliot Holmes’ apartment has remained frozen in perfect stasis, with nothing but the fine layer of dust as a reminder of the time passed. _A dead woman’s house_ , A thinks. The shrubs on the windowsill have perished months ago, their corpses blackened and damp.

A curls herself onto the nearest chair, setting dust motes dancing in the faint streetlights streaming though the blinds.

_’…will be waiting for your call.’_

The tremors in her hand and the pounding in her chest is worse now than all those times when she’d stared right down the barrel of a gun pointed at her forehead.

Dying has surely changed things.

The phone has a dial tone when she picks it up, someone has surely been paying the utility bills for the dead woman. A stuffs the torn page in her pocket and takes a deep breath.

The phone rings thrice before it’s picked up.

* * *

 

Almost ten hours between them, when B’s phone rings at the alighting hour of five in the morning, and he’s in the shower washing off the grime of the Seattle streets, the blood of a middleman in an art theft ring still crusting his knuckles. 

 _Night well spent though,_ the thought crosses his mind just as he works the soap up into a lather, mentally ticking how much more he’ll need before dumping the evidence at the police station. Not much. He’s gotten into a good rhythm since surviving the Texas case.

The phone rings a moment later.  _God, your timing. As bad as Lawliet’s._ The thought stings, just as it rears its ugly head in B’s consciousness, but it doesn’t cut, as it would have several years ago. He shuts off the water, trying to wring the remnants of soap from his hair. 

He catches sight of himself in the mirror, red-eyes wide, mouth drawn in a frown despite his best efforts.  _All right, so haven’t quite washed that out of myself._  B sighs deeply tries to force his thoughts away from his history. It gets easier every time. 

Still isn’t easy, though.

The phone rings again.  _Let’s have a smile for A, shall we?_  He turns the corners of his mouth.

 _I suppose I ought to take all the chances to hear her voice that I can get._  He strides dripping across the slate-gray carpet, shaking his hair off and rubbing his hands dry on the duvet cover before he picks up the phone just as it rings for a third time.

 “Call for room 601 from St. Petersburg, will you take it?” is the cool voice of the hotel receptionist.

“Of course,” the connection goes through just as B thinks it odd that A hasn’t bothered to cover the call location.  _Getting sentimental, or want me in your playground, Acey?_  He smiles as he hears the other line, “Hey Ace. Happy birthday. Didja shoot someone for me today?”

Hearing B speak after so many months shouldn’t feel this way but his voice is slightly nasal and rough, wrung out and soft in the way that feels like _home_ and A has to close her mouth before she could say something she doesn’t want to.

She can picture his slim wrists, fingers soiled with dust and jam, inching around the cluttered tables looking for a smoke.

The last few months are a blur - guns, breathlessness and bloodstains that just won’t go away no matter how hard she scrubbed, and yet she needs only to close her eyes and it’ll be as if he’s right there in front of her with paper strewn all over the stained carpet.

‘I’m not here for work’, she says.

_Then what are you there for?_

The city is familiar to her in unfamiliar ways, and she had a ticket booked for the first flight out of Kiev the moment she’d finished handing in the report to Watari.

‘Are you running from something?’, he’d asked her.

This is the opposite of running. B needs only to fiddle with a couple of keys in that piece of shit computer he has and he’ll know exactly where she is. That’s way more than what everyone else gets from her anyway.

In restrospect, coming back here was the easiest decision she’d made in years, easier than lying, easier than pulling a trigger, easier than slipping into a disguise.

So why are they surprised? Did they expect her to crumble and beg for rescue than to follow the threads and set everything in order again?

She had never really prepared for this conversation, it was always effortless with B anyway. She was always transparent in his eyes

‘It’s way past bedtime isn’t it? Why aren’t you asleep yet like a good boy?’ and B snorts in response.

‘How are you?’, A adds as an afterthought, her voice practised and soft, as if that’s what she’s most interested in knowing and counts the seconds before B sees right through her flimsy pretence from the dank motel room halfway across the world.

* * *

 

B smiles absently at the banter from the Russian winter, miles away.  _Same Ace, I guess_. There’s something nagging at his consciousness, but he figures it’s the residual thoughts of Lawliet, sticky like jam on the tip of his tongue. 

“Oh, you know. Working. Keeping my hands dirty, the usual shit,” B flexes his now-clean white knuckles, “So, not working, huh? Finally taking a day off for your birthday? Sounds quiet there.”

A loud yell sounds from the sidewalk outside of B’s frosted hotel window. It’s not exactly the nicest of neighbourhoods. It never is. 

“Unlike here.”

* * *

 

‘Some birthday huh?’  A stifles a sigh.

 She didn’t even realize it’s almost January till the crumpled up last page of the book appeared on her doorstep in Córdoba with  B’s handwriting in gaudy red ink and a bunch of withering roses. Last year had been nice: Sarajevo is always cloudy this time of the year, the quietness of the ceasefire hanging heavy in the air with the acrid smoke tickling the back of her throat. But the kill had been clean and she’d slipped of town by the time the missile hit, disappeared without a trace like smoke, a half eaten _Ćevapi_ in hand.

 ‘No survivors’ she’d breathed into her mouthpiece. 

 The memory of that quiet triumph melts into something else and A’s entire body tenses in anticipation of something she doesn’t even see yet. 

 ‘No survivors’, the man in black cries to the others, his form blurred and unfocussed like in one of her nightmares. A watches him train his rifle towards her forehead with a practiced hand , reflected on the growing puddle of blood on the floor. 

B clears his throat on the other end and she sighs.

  ‘There’s nothing this year, not even desert. It’s cold as death out here and I’m pretty sure I saw a kid talking to herself outside my apartment.’ 

  ‘It’s a nice neighbourhood’, she quips in before B can comment. 

  ‘ There are fucking plants on the windowsills can you believe? I slept a whole six hours, made tea, read a magazine. I’m pretty sure I’ll knit you a jumper on your birthday.’ 

 Whether B is convinced of it, she isn’t sure so it’s probably not wise to even ask but the question hangs at the back of her throat like a half remembered nightmare.

_‘How much time do I have?’_

‘I want to come see you’ she says instead.

* * *

B listens with a smile playing on his lips, imagining A holed up next to the snowfall, though his smile falters as he hears her sigh on the other end. _Guess Sarajavo took its toll on her._  The war had been long, for certain, but Ace had always taken such things with careful levity, claiming it kept them in the business. 

He hesitates, coughs slightly at the pregnant silence on the other line, trying to run through questions she might want to answer. He reaches for a pack of cigarettes. Her commentary on the neighbourhood is a little more bitter than her usual bite, frosted by the winter. 

“ _I want to come see you.”_

B falters with his lighter, “Yeah? For sure Ace, whatever you want. I’ll have these art thieves tied up in the next few days, then we can meet up, maybe spend a few days together. I mean, I probably shouldn’t stick around Seattle. We could go down south, or maybe something to take the edge off the weather.”

Again, a silence on the other line a little longer than is typical of A. He bites a little harder at the cigarette, “Saw the papers from Sarajevo. Neat work. Did something cut a little deep, though?”

* * *

 

A’s fingertips are numb from the cold and B’s late-night, indoor voice promising her of freshly laundered motel sheets and cheap diner coffee wraps around her like a warming blanket.

She remembers.

_Stolen sips from the Watari’s stash of aged whisky up on the attic, smoking in the bathtub, the smell of hair dye on his pillow and dirt caked fingernails._

It’s so easy to slip into all that and A wants to live in that locked room of comforting memories inside her head. But the tail end of B’s sentence rouses something from within her, and as much she hates it, the dismissive laugh that is her reply is as quick as a heartbeat.

‘You tell me, baby bird. How’s the busywork treating you?’

She bites down on her lip, tasting blood. B’s answering silence sends a depraved warmth right down to her toes.

 _Concern is pity_ and A crushes it with scathing condescension, distancing herself from the sickening softness of his tone that she’d found so comforting seconds ago.  

‘Art Thieves, B? Really? What happened to the bigger fish?

A curls her legs underneath her to steady herself, the frayed stockings barely warming her.

‘I did tell you to take up more headhunting gigs. You had beautiful form. ’

She remembers that too, a line of perfectly aligned bullet holes on the target: if it were flesh: heart, liver and a chunk of the left lung.

Artist’s fingers, soaked in an invisible red as her own had been even then, curling into her hair as she kissed the smoke-soaked bitterness of his lips against the glass.

‘Why did we stop B?’ she says.

* * *

 

_‘Art Thieves, B? Really? What happened to the bigger fish?_

“Hey, you know, wasn’t it you who told me to hole up and stay safe when I messed myself up?” He starts, but she’s already gone on, tossing barbs like careless grenades. Then she drops the bomb.

“ _Why did we stop, B?”_

B sits heavily down on the bed, searching for the words to say. _Too many silences in this goddamn conversation. You used to be the one to fill them._ There’s a flicker of imagined blackbirds in the corner of his vision, and he brushes it away.

_I really can’t fill yours._

“You stopped.” is all he says, though he knows full well he should say _It wasn’t good for us,_  or perhaps, _you know better than anyone that I’ll never stop with –_  he doesn’t let himself finish that sentence, lets his wet curls fall back against the white pillow, the phone cord springing taut. 

 _You stopped just like I left, didn’t you? Not quite. But almost._  He steels himself to find something to draw her in, find out what’s eating her insides out. _It’s not a good for us. But it’s the only thing we’ve got._

 _“_ I wanna see you too, A. Can you get a flight? The twelfth?” _Sundays are for sinners_ , he would have said if it hadn’t been ten months since they’d seen each other last, but the levity dies in his throat.

On the other hand, he can almost hear her red lips turning up on the other line. 

* * *

**January 13, 1997**

The terminal is filled with reuniting families and separating lovers and A can almost taste the salt of their tears in the air. Her entire life has been an effort in disappearing into the background and she fades into the softening glare of the Florida sun outside.

The air is warmer and it should loosen the knot in her chest. 

It doesn’t.

B’s leaning against his car outside, smoking, sleeves pulled down to the knuckles and A tucks herself under his chin without permission, wrapping her hands around his torso. His ribs jut out against her elbows. She must be too jet lagged to not want to kiss him.

B’s arm curls around her head awkwardly and he hums against her hair, a little startled by her affection. He tangles his fingers into the knots in her hair, bringing them up to his eyes to inspect the mess.

‘You look like shit’ she says, smiling, before he can say it himself.

_Older_ [do not edit or repost]

* * *

“Same to you, Acey,” he lets the fiery curls drop, “Though red suits you best, makes you look a bit more bearable. Happy belated. Let’s go somewhere, I’ve been driving for almost two days, haven’t eaten since Kentucky.” 

She’s thinner, he notices, and there are new scars along the skin of her shoulder blade when he runs his finger underneath her airy white shirt. He catches her eye and she gives him a flat stare. _Alright, let’s not start with that one_. He starts the black ‘85 Challenger up with a deft twist of his wrist and they drive in silence. It’s almost comfortable, but not quite. 

Luckily it isn’t far to the pizza place by the beachside. They’re seated at a corner booth, away from the busy buzz of rich snow-bird vacationers. B knots his ankles with A’s to get her attention, taking note of the way her eyelashes soften, downcast at his touch, the way her fingers relax. It’s familiar like a mirror. 

B tries, and fails not to wonder what Lawliet thinks when the same softness crawls over B’s face. 

“So I’ve been busy enough, but do you wanna go first or should I? It’s been a while. Bet you have more than a few stories to tell.”

* * *

_Stories?_

The sun is warm on A’s face and she shimmies out of her jacket, making a show out of shedding it like a second layer of skin. Every move she’s so far has been a performance, and there’s no telling if B has really noticed.

The last remaining cigarette at the bottom of her pocket feels out of place on her lips. She doesn’t really want to smoke. This is just window dressing, yet another prop. The lighter is unsteady in her hands, the tremor is making itself known again.

It’s very dream-like, this meeting of theirs. The same showy town where they always meet dressed as lovers and the stained leather on the seats of B’s car. There’s a yellow balloon flying outside, B’s ankles are a reassuring weight against hers, an anchor holding her down.

The lighter is in B’s hands before she even realizes it and his enthusiasm to help her is quite obvious. A hopes that he’s taken this as some sort of a sign that she really is well. They’ve always been like this, both of them finding a shelter in their vices.  

‘I’ve got a couple’ she says, sinking into her seat. Everything has been better than she’d expected. They’ve slipped right back into the comforting familiarity that hadn’t been there when they had last met. 

It makes her skin _crawl._

‘There are zombies in St. Petersburg’ she says smirking, leaning right into his space and folding her legs in front of her. The posture is unmistakable and unsurprisingly enough, B’s reaction is immediate. What she doesn’t expect, was the slow tightening of the knot in her chest in tandem to the muted crumbling of B’s expression.

_Beautiful._

This pain cuts right down to her bone and burrows in deeper inside her than the memories of those nights she’d spent strapped to a table in Oymyakon.

Her hands are on his thighs before she could say another word.

* * *

”Zombies, huh. Well, the undead here isn’t much different than it’s always been,” their cute reference to the drug scene and the cases it drags up. A is pulling on old memories, old motions, but the scene feels cheap, A’s hands feel cheap, and B feels a little too much like he’s fallen into another role, though he plays the part well. 

“D’you wanna go tell me about it after we eat?” _Can deal with the sex then, I guess._ B lights a cigarette of his own, resists the urge to shy his legs out of her sudden grip.  _Look, you can do this. It’s Acey. It’s fine_. “I’ve got us the old room at the Emerson.”

 _She needs this_. B can see that, bright as the sun in her red hair. But the air in Jacksonville is thicker, more humid than it was a year ago. Breathing feels a little more false. _Like you do_. B thinks before he can shove the thought back down, and maybe it’s unfair, because _something_ is eating at A, but he’s wondering if there was always this undercurrent, this feeling of staged and scripted moments to the way she speaks and moves.

It’s gone a moment after she shifts her neck, brushing her hair over her shoulder, such that B wonders if he imagined it, even now. 

 _I mean, I wasn’t that aware to a whole lot then._  The memories clench sickly at his gut, and he forces himself to swallow the mouthful of pizza. _Sure as hell not going back there._

“Hear anything from ‘the Greatest’, lately?” B asks absently, slipping into the old patterns like a sweater that doesn’t quite fit anymore. 

* * *

B lowers his head and stubs out his cigarette in the ashtray, the words slipping out of him like a profanity. He looks almost breakable when he’s like this and something snaps inside A.

There’s one thing about B she never understood. He is normally so perceptive, he sees things in places others see nothing but black. But with Lawliet, he is hardly ever rational. Someone who’d rather sit behind a screen than get his hands dirty gets to be ‘the greatest’ while she has to haul herself halfway across the world and push herself on him before he’d even look at her.

A has stopped wars, slaughtered whole families without stopping to think about sparing crying children and she carries B’s ghost in her head everywhere she goes. She’s tired now, right down to her bones and it feels like she’d be spending another lifetime just trying to get B to _see_. But there would always be yet other things about him she could never understand.

When she tries to remember, she recalls a wrinkled face with perfectly white teeth and ink blots on white paper.

_’Look at these pictures and tell me what you see darling’_

Only, they weren’t pictures.

It took A three hours to read through the testing manual in the Psychiatrist’s office and another two to figure out exactly what to tell the kindly old woman (Watari’s old colleague who’d been appointed to test them for ‘abnormalities’) to keep them off her case.

This is what she’s good at: learn a system, take it apart from the inside out. Humans were no different- a basic set of behavioural patterns: happiness, anger, misery.

B’s always been like her. In those inkblots he’d always seen exactly what they’d wanted him to see, and yet he’s grown into this. Bent inwards into himself, shoulders slumped, eyes soft with _concern_ .

Empathy wasn’t something A could ever learn from books. In twenty years, she has ‘fallen in love’ fifteen times in her life, and each time has served her well. A pretty young girl, rose-cheeked and blushing is too difficult a prey to resist. She’s never been shown the door, and they never could see her coming. It was an easy enough disguise.

But for B love wasn’t about practising expressions in front of a mirror and carefully collected notes in the margins of a journal. B was an artist on paper and behind the trigger of a gun, but in front of Lawliet, he was always a pathetic mess.

It’s too difficult not to respond to his subtle enthusiasm.

‘He’s great. He’s stuck up North for some government gig. We met last week’ she adds a coy smile for effect.

B doesn’t even need to assess if she’s lying, which she isn’t at all either way. She simply doesn’t tell him the full story, and already she can tell that he’s swallowing back bile, probably thinking he’ll help her this way.

It is during moments like this, when she’s half wishing for a quiet death, and half triumphant at finally having quietened the voices in her head that A feels most alive. Oymyakon might just have been a figment of her imagination.

_But there’s no helping me anymore B._

It feels a little like the recoil of the rifle against her shoulder and that gush of red caught on her telescope, the crack of ribs against her closed fist, the soft sinking of her blade in flesh.

She doesn’t let him go.

‘Let’s step out’, she whispers against his ear, her hand trailing against the heat of his thighs, the tip of tongue laps just slightly against his cheek.

Other memories bubble to the surface now.

_Poor hungry little boy, do you still fuck like an orphan? Are you still afraid you’ll lose him?_

B’s eyes are unreadable as she leads him outside and pulls him into the car over her, their lips crashing into a kiss.

‘It’s okay, you can close your eyes if you don’t want to look at me’ she slurs into his mouth, unbuttoning her shirt.

_Whose face do you imagine when you touch me?_

* * *

 

B isn’t entirely surprised when she slides him out of the café, leaving a twenty on the table and following her to where they’ve tucked the car. It’s not the first time they’ve fumbled in the back seat; B thinks of the car as theirs more than anything else. But it doesn’t have the desperation it used to, there’s no fire in it. Just the tired flicker of memory and muscle memory.

“ _It’s okay. You can close your eyes if you don’t want to look at me.”_

_The fuck, A?_

“Of course I’ll look, you think I don’t like what I see?” normally there’d be more of a flirt there, he’d take her chin and appraise her like a proper wife or whore, but today he just can’t seem to pick up the rhythm of it, even though his body is starting to respond.

She runs a finger along her red-painted lip like she’s been doing for years, and it’s just now, with the clarity of a year and a half he’s fought tooth and nail for that he realizes why it makes his cock twitch. _She’s doing it to look like him._

 _And she fucking knows it._ Her hands are down his back before he has a chance to think on it, nails down his spine in a way that screams out to an _older_ memory with agonized black eyes, sugar-scent, whiter hands that reach for his throat _fuck fuck fuck_ –

He shoves her against the passenger’s seat window with a little too much force, breathing hard. She seems to crumble for a moment, and then simply quirks her lips back at him curiously.

“Don’t play fucking games with me, A. Is that what you’re here for?” his skin is crawling where her nails have left marks, and he knows if she tries to put a hand on him again it won’t end well.   _There’s no way anything here is going to end well_. B should have known, _knew_ , but was still too curious about the way she looked at him to not want to see what it’s like to be on the other side.

He fumbles the key into the ignition while she buttons up the shirt over her black lace bra. Stares at her slightly smudged makeup, though her glance is as flinty as ever, “Look. You’re my friend, alright? But I can’t be anything else for you, and you’re not him, and won’t ever be.”

_So let’s stop this before you get hurt._

* * *

She wishes she could just stop, make it all go away but time seems to slow down around A nowadays, each second stretching itself again and again till it’s all just a blur. 

The glass behind her head is a delicate spiderweb of cracks. Another hard shove and the glass might break right into her skull. B’s knuckles dig painfully against her collarbone, the softness in him has all but vanished, and even now A thinks of lacing her fingers around his wrist automatically, fixing his posture so he could hurt her even more.

She has waited so long for this, and the violence tastes like victory.

This is what A’s dreams have always looked like: B’s fingers against her throat in the backseat of his car, her leaving marks on his skin as a reminder that she was there. She has lived in every permutation of that in her head, in most of them Lawliet is dead, maybe he didn’t exist in the first place. In some he gets assassinated on live television and goes down like a martyr, in others he boils slowly to death from eating infected bushmeat in Uganda, but in all of them, she knocks down the wall between her room and Lawliet’s back in Winchester puts in a marble bathtub where B fucks her to sleep and later kisses her red, ripe lips on Lawliet’s grave, both of them dressed like death.

But they’ve gone from pretending puppy love to hate fucking and now the sheer rage in B’s eyes makes it clear that he wouldn’t do so much as even touch her even if she begged for it.

B’s hand quivers against her chest.

_Tch._

He will always be too human.

A remembers garish red neon lights, jagged shard of a smashed beer bottle in her hand, the smell of puke and piss in that back alley. Fuck it seems like it was so long ago, she doesn’t even remember the name of that town anymore.

_But you couldn’t kill that little kitty B. I had to snap its neck for you. You’d love anything, even that awful thing, but you’ll never love me._

There’s a distant ringing in A’s ears, each throbbing pulse of her heart dull and sluggish. An unknown part of her wants to fling B against the windshield and run him over, it won’t take her much. Her hands stretch toward him without her consent and she feels happy, like something had crawled inside her head and is doing all the thinking for her. 

_IT’S SO COLD.  
STOPSTOPSTOPSTOP_

B retreats like touching her has tainted him and A resurfaces, that ringing is suddenly gone.

‘..you’re not him, and you won’t ever be.’

This silence is familiar somehow and between feeling afraid of dying and wanting to kill,she can even convince herself that it’s comforting . She half expects Lawliet to be the one driving the car when she looks.  It’s like they’re stealing each other’s skin little by little each time she’s not looking. B can walk around this town leaving corpses behind and everyone else will see Lawliet in him.  But then, no one even knows what Lawliet looks like, and right now she’s half sure that she’s going to end up as one of B’s corpses.

 B’s knuckles tighten around the steering wheel. Both of them were always so gentle with her, as if she’ll break under their hands. B’s hand on her throat reminded her of Lawliet, and she’s pretty sure it was the other way around when she’d been with Lawliet last time.

_And both of them ended up crawling back to me when the other wasn’t there._

* * *

**Jan 13, 1997 [evening]**

The water in this place smells metallic like the way most small towns do and it makes the back of A’s throat itch. They’ve been back at the motel for hours. The scissors glint in the harsh glare of the afternoon sun filtering through the grimy windows of the bathroom and it takes A just a couple of snips around her nape to take out handfuls of burned out, split ended clumps of her hair.

_Maybe this will jog his memory._

B is smoking beside the window when she steps out, wrapped up in a towel.

‘Remember this?’

* * *

_What the hell did we even do together?_ B wonders while they watch ‘Blood Simple’ on the motel’s tiny television set, adjacent on the double bed, but not touching each other. His memory of the past year is a hazy blur of cases, images that his mind conjured up, desperate and dark places that it’s hard to look at. A is the only constant, a bright, insistent flame that matches her red hair but not the carved lines on her face.

Part of B wants to relent, play with her long red hair and just _let it be_. He knows too well not to lose himself in characters again, and A has always walked the fine line between someone he knows like he knows himself and someone who’s not quite real.

She vanishes into the bathroom just as he’s thinking about it. He gusts out a breath, walks to the window, lights a cigarette. Thinking about how not to push, with her or with Lawliet, he’s not sure. But there’s a shift in the warm Florida wind, a scent more real than road dirt and stolen Cuban cigars. It takes a moment for him to recognize it as Atlantic sea-breeze, and the oceans of memories between him and Winchester.

B doesn’t have all the time in the world left. Or at least, she doesn’t.

_“Remember this?”_

* * *

 

B takes a sharp breath full of nicotine, rather than oxygen, and cough several times while the memory of a much smaller, but just as fiery A glares back at him through the eyes of the woman who looks too old for her eighteen years.

“Yeah, I remember.”

Her hair is cropped roughly short, in exactly the same pixie pattern she had altered it to, after he had snuck into her room late at night when he was eleven, she was twelve, cut it with a pair of medical scissors and left the evidence pooled around her like blood on her pillow.

They didn’t really get along.

 _Is this your way of accusing me of hurting you? Or telling me we can be friends again?_  He steps closer, runs a hand through the shorn edges before he can stop himself. B’s always been physical first, but he lets the hand drop. “So, we going to play nice, friends again, Acey?”

But she had fought tooth and nail when he had taken her hair, fought dirty and earned his grudging respect. Even if he was still angry at the time about her and Lawliet being close (pubescent jealousy never did get him very far, and by now, he’s reasonably sure he imagined the way she’d sit with him a little _too_ long). _So do you want to fight, Ace?_ She looks like she’d rather run, even as she stares him down with a forced smirk.

And that gets to him. Even if she is fucking with his emotions a little. _It’s not like we’re not using each other._ Against his better judgment, B steps closer to her, slowly wraps his arms around her shoulders. Tucks his chin on the tense muscle there. “Sorry your birthday is kinda shit.”

* * *

A hums against his neck.

‘Make it better then’, her voice is muffled against his collar.

B softens a little at the edges but he is still visibly tensed. He holds her at a distance, his fingers gripping her arms a little too tight and that’s more than what A could have hoped for. He smells of cigarette smoke and soap, the prickling edges of his stubble digs into A’s cheeks but this is a grounding sort of pain. The faint pink scratches they’ll leave on her cheek will look like they belong there.

A slips her hands under his shirt, her fingers probing around the dips in between his ribs. B freezes a little, puzzled and squirms under touch. A’s fingertips have always been cold. The more he struggles, the tighter she holds on, inhaling and exhaling deeply on the skin of his neck.

B struggles then breaks out in fits of giggles as they collapse backwards on the bed. B’s laugh is heady and full, it sears her insides. A wants to touch his lips, slip a couple of them in between his lips but she settles for straddling him, pinning him down and blowing raspberries around his navel. B laughs again, his hand twisting around her hair.

A mouths at the soft skin around his navel, noses at the fine hair that disappears inside his trousers. A pokes her chin further down, the tip of her nose brushing against B’s clothed cock and he gasps in between breaths. A wants to kiss him again, bruise his lips and let her hands unzip those awful jeans, make him moan into her mouth.

But B shoves her to his side, straightening himself up and poking her lightly in the ribs with his elbow in a washed-out imitation of affection. He almost has to look away. The movement is subtle, rippling under his skin and it vanishes in a split second, almost as if A had imagined it all.

_It was real wasn’t it?_

He looked _soft._  

He looked like wanted her too.

_He doesn’t even realize how much he really wants this._

‘B..please’, she pleads, her voice a low, almost seductive rasp as she inches closer to him and settles herself on top of him again, his hipbones smug under her thighs. 

_You can’t leave now B. Not until I say so._

* * *

 

“ _B….please.”_  when she begs, he wonders again, _is that what I sound like to Lawliet?_  There’s a strange desperation to her voice, not quite like the way he clings to Lawliet, but perhaps the way he clings to _anything_  when his eyes are lying to him. More raw that he’s ever seen her, and he’s caught fascinated for a moment. 

The vulnerability vanishes when her hips press down harder, more deliberately into his bones. And while he could lie back, let his body do the work and slip into a role just for her, that’s not what he’s ever done with A. Not with someone who he trusts. _Or maybe that’s what I always did?_

 _“_ I’m sorry, Ace,” he has to use his muscles to pull her off, trying not to leave bruises on her arms with his grip. She doesn’t fight back, but she sure as hell doesn’t help him, either. He kisses her on the forehead, hugs her tight again, “I can’t do that to you. It’d be cheap, and I love you too much for that.”

He doesn’t look at her face when he says it, but she grips his elbow almost softly, and when he exhales, he doesn’t worry. He tries not to. 

* * *

 

A second ago they were jostling on the bed, pushing and pulling against the currents, and now they’re still all stiff-limbs and breathless, trying to find a place to fit inside each other. But the veil slips and A collapses in B’s arms for just a bit. It feels good to be held. When she’s not trying so hard, being with him like this is the easiest thing ever. There’s no hunger here, only warmth. This time no matter how difficult it is to deny herself of this, she just gives in.

B’s fingers rub soothing circles in her scalp and the tears fall over, the weight of everything comes crashing down on her fragile shoulders like one domino falling after the other. B makes it seem like it’s okay to breathe again. He brushes the wetness from under her eyes quickly, like he wants to push the memory of this away. Then it hits her.

He’s never seen her cry before.

It’s hard to regain composure and tear herself away from B’s arms. But some things are unpleasant yet necessary, like the 4 times she’s had to pull the trigger on someone ever since this year began. Every count seems like another step in a long, agonizing chain reaction that’ll implode someday and take her with it.

That arouses another memory, another motel room in another time, unloaded guns spread like lovers on their bed and her fingers sandwiched between B’s warm cheek and the cold metal of the rifle. Her fingers sing with the weight of that memory but the voice from the memory which should be her own is now unrecognizable:

_‘Don’t look back after they’re dead B. You don’t want them to come back for you.’_

The B from now, coaxes her back to present with careful fingers brushing her hair back from her face, he is soft again, maybe even pleased that he doesn’t have to pretend to want to touch her anymore.

‘I..I have to go.’ she whispers.

* * *

 

“Okay. If you need to.” he says it softly, her words dragging up the memory of a note dried from his own tears almost four years ago now. _It’s not like I don’t know about where you are. Sometimes it’s better to be alone there._

He picks out a half-finished  cigarette, still smoking in the ashtray, and it’s only a moment after he’s lit it up with shaking hands that he realizes it’s hers. He takes a drag anyways, watching her pack, and shuffling his feet back and forth on the cheat carpet which rasps like sandpaper. 

 _If anyone’d asked me when we were kids, I wouldn’t have thought she could cry. Not for real._  

B catches her hand as she pulls on her shoes at the door, clumsy with emotion but still composed in spite of it. He kisses her cheek, and it almost feels like missing her lips.  

“Don’t lose touch. Please.” he says it with levity, but certainty, and she nods back, stealing a lingering touch on his back before forcing a smile and sweeping out the door. It shuts gently, but with a sort of finality behind her. 

_I wish all of them ended this way. At least, the ones that had to end at all._

B picks the peeling paint off the window frame as the sunset closes on the parking lot. Thinking about how it all started, bright-eyes and crime games in the real world. Ambition and emotion, but underneath it all, _something_  that had kept the three of them together. The same work that drove them apart.

_Things cycle back, go sour, but I guess we all have each other._

_Even after all this time? After everything?_

B finishes his cigarette and dares to hope so. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> As a retrospective note, we discovered the song '9 Crimes' by Damien Rice fits this piece extraordinarily well. 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMGh3Ts5-WQ
> 
> For those who want a listen.


End file.
